Counterpoint, Thomas Edison, a downright asshole who abused the legal system and patent office for his and others’ personal gain and quite possibly a second-rate electrical infrastructure.
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Which is far more than you get with capitalism. Have you ever told your boss that what they want you to do is bullshit, and you are going to do your own thing your own way? What do you think will happen if you did, even if you had the support of the majority of the other workers?
I live in a world where bosses feel that people working for them have to justify the amount of time that they use the toilet.
While I am at it, how many ideas have been shot down by capitalism because they will not make enough money for the capitalist class, and the original creator cannot raise the funds to do it themselves? You can’t create anything from nothing, which is what a lot of people have once they have finished working and paid for food, rent and utilities.
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Given that trade has existed since literally prehistory, I have no idea what what this world would even look like.
I dislike the guy because he obviously dislikes software engineers.
“their loyal vassals, the software developers”
That’s an insult against the character of software developers everywhere.
“Like any programmer, the people running our digital companies embrace any hack or kluge capable of keeping the program running.”
Now that is an attack on our craft. Any true artisan knows that this is even worse than a mere attack on character.
So, therefore, he is obviously wrong no matter what he says.
Apart from that, his arguments are very weak. Apparently, UBI doesn’t stop Uber from “extracting value”, so UBI is bad. Well, universal health care doesn’t stop Uber from extracting value, either, so is universal health care bad now?
Now, some people argue that market economy is so broken that you can only abolish it and replace it by something completely different (the body count is already in the millions, but hey, maybe the next try will work), while at the same time some of the best places to live run on variants of market economy with many small fixes.
Either way, it logically doesn’t matter to the question whether a market economy with one more “hack” is better or worse than the same market economy without that hack.
I guess Rushkoff is a communist who voted for Trump hoping that it would make the revolution arrive sooner.
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They are indeed just bribes. The point is that we should be demanding better bribes. The ones they’re promising are designed to keep us just barely stable enough to be useful to them. We both deserve and can get better than that.
Indeed, Rushkoff points that out with his discussion of the Dutch East India Company. Employment itself is a capitalist trick designed to separate common people from “the means of production”, as Marx would say. This is why radical unions like the IWW are against the wage labor system. Wages, much like UBI, are a bribe to keep common people just comfortable enough that they don’t all get together, decide that the capitalists are a useless parasite, and start doing production on their own through worker-owned shops, cooperatives, etc.
But wages have been around for so long that few people see them as a trick (some indigenous cultures still do). By now, most people feel like a wage is the only path to a prosperous and independent life. They are grateful to have one, and keenly aware that it can be taken from them if they make a wrong step. Imagine this same sequence playing out with UBI and consider whether that would increase or decrease the power and prosperity of common people.
Boiled down, I would state his argument as: People think that socialism means redistributing money, but it actually means redistributing control of the means of production - i.e. economic power. UBI proponents support redistributing some money, but often their goal is not to redistribute economic power, it’s to stabilize the current extremely unequal power distribution.
I know it’s counterintuitive and weird to consider that money is power but at the same time redistributing money doesn’t necessarily redistribute power. But what can I say: late stage capitalism.
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[citation needed]
I get your point. I think as well communalism could be used as a means for complementing our existing Capitalist system.
There would need to be a focus on the communes and collectives training and educating their workers so they may leave at some point to rejoin the capitalist society in a better poaition than before.
Isn’t this the premise of The Road to Serfdom?
In fairness, there’s something to his argument, though. We’ve already seen what government has done with excessive means and morality testing: Welfare to Work, mandatory drug testing, even constraints on political speech and the right to boycott attached to government assistance.
It’s not enough to implement UBI unless there’s a broader framework to protect people from abuse and oppression, and frankly most schemes for UBI don’t seem to take the more abusive tendencies of government or corporations into account. I don’t buy the argument that UBI has nothing to do with the wildest dreams of bad actors. If you can dream it, someone will try it, if only slowly.
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That is just part of human nature, and a hook used to sell socialism. I recommend asking committed socialists where they see themselves personally after the revolution. My experience in asking that has convinced me that socialists are tremendously optimistic people.
But as far as UBI is concerned, it is an interesting proposition. It would be great for creative people or people who would be able to help others rather than work an hourly job.
The potential downsides are there as well. Not every person would take that opportunity to do useful things. I don’t know how you can provide UBI without encouraging some percentage of the population to just permanently learn to live on that, with no intention of developing skills or doing anything useful. I don’t personally believe that idleness is healthy for a person in the long term.
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I guess my point is treating software developers as some other class of citizen apart from the 1 percent or apart from everyone else isn’t meritted.
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they made me laugh because they are silly, but they didn’t sober me up one bit…nope not one bit. hic
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What he’s missing here is that even if UBI is a way for evil motherfuckers to help entrench and perpetuate their evil motherfuckery, it’s STILL better than the path we’re on right now. “Taking poverty off the table” and solidifying power at the top is better than NOT taking poverty off the table and solidifying that power.
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This is the point; there’s a c-hairs worth of space between Rushkoff and fake-socialists like Elon Musk–it’s basically the same entitled white dude version of liberty that is more concerned with some abstract violation of negative liberties than any concrete thing affecting women or people of color. Actual Keynesian Helicopter Money would solve a lot of problems, but for that very reason, it can’t be allowed by the Heighten The Distinctions (from a comfortable distance) folks.
I’ve always had a somewhat different concern about UBI, though it is linked by being regarding where the money ends up.
What is to stop people essentially selling their UBI to others? Whether by as a debt to creditors, coercion of whatever means, a deliberate financial strategy, or whatever, what good is UBI if there’s nothing stopping it simply ending up in the hands of those with the means to extract in the long-term it from those needing to sell it in the short-term?
The easiest scenario to imagine is something like poverty debts to loan sharks/drug dealers, but anything up to mortgage payments and using them as something akin to bonds is plausible, too.
If UBI doesn’t provide a safety cushion that cannot easily be taken from you, then it will be taken from you.
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Much housing price instability results from investors snapping up housing (see London) as if it were a futures market. The relatively modest infusion of cash in a UBI might change rental prices at the lower end in distressed communities like Birmingham or Gary, but the most bubbly bubbles we see today are being driven by forces other than poor people having slightly more income.
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Isn’t “free stuff will enslave you” the same bullshut used by the GOP to attack universal healthcare? If you’re on the same page as the fascists you better watch it. And what about social security, are seniors “enslaved”, or just “not starving?”
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I’ve been taking anarchist texts from archive.org and formatting them for submission to the anarchist library, and it’s been very instructive. It’s clear that English speaking anarchists have a peculiar and incomplete sense of their history. Anti-collectivist anarchism had existed long before Kropotkin ever put pen to paper. Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism is almost finished, just needs a final proof read. Enemies of Society: An Anthology of Individualist & Egoist Thought will take more time due to the low quality scan, but OCR is getting pretty good.
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Whoa there. It looks like you’ve been snorting uncut politics. You’re gonna want to get some lactose and mix it in there.
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What you’re pointing out is that people would have a decent fall back position to working. Many would then choose not to work. Employers would have to outbid the state by quite a bit since their offer requires exertion and the state’s offer requires nothing.
There are some pretty serious macro consequences from a disincentive like that.
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Do we?
How about before William Godwin?
Also, lets not delude ourselves into thinking the 19th century individualist anarchists were pro-capitalism, like the propertarians do.
https://theconjurehouse.com/2016/11/18/the-stirner-wasnt-a-capitalist-you-fucking-idiot-cheat-sheet/
But none of that is relevant to what I was answering, which was the claim that collectivism leads to a loss of individuality.
I personally do not fit neatly into an individualist or collectivist box. I believe that the strength of the collective is the individual and the strength of the individual is the collective. Both are weakened without the other.
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